


The Seedling

by Anonymous



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Friends With Benefits To Lovers, M/M, Mpreg, Pining, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:09:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29520669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: After a run-in with strange machinery on a world newly discovered through Meridian, Evfra soon realises that one of his clandestine meetings with Jaal has unexpected consequences.
Relationships: Jaal Ama Darav/Evfra de Tershaav
Kudos: 1
Collections: Five Figure Fanwork Exchange 2020





	The Seedling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tentacledicks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentacledicks/gifts).



“It’s difficult not to wonder who they were sometimes, isn’t it?”

Though Evfra had always done his best not to mythologize the Remnant as so many did, especially now that their part in the creation of the angara had been revealed, he could not help but give a nod at Jaal’s reverent words. Spreading out from the foot of the precipice of black, blue-veined stone they stood on and stretching further than he could see into the dark distance of the vault was a field of pyramids, pulsing with some secret life, working to fulfil their unknown, ancient purpose.

“It’s daunting, yet these new mysteries show us new directions,” the Moshae said, moving to Jaal’s other side. “I am glad to be present for such moments.”

Archaeology had never been a passion of Evfra’s. Even back on Voeld, he hadn’t had much time to think about the distant past. Jaal had been the one to convince him to enter one of these vaults and Evfra had agreed on the grounds that it was strategically valuable: With the kett pushed back and no new leader in sight for now, he had the time to follow Ryder to this first new world discovered through Merdidian, reaffirming that the angara did not plan to leave these planets to the Nexus alone. He had not lied about his reasoning, but it would also have been hard to deny Jaal when he’d sounded so enamoured, so eager to share this wonder with Evfra. He understood that enthusiasm now.

This planet, which they had taken to call Reveya, the returned, had only been hidden by the Scourge, not damaged, if its steady temperature and normal growth patterns were anything to go by. This was fortunate, as they had not yet located the monuments and specific vault that controlled its environment and had only stumbled upon this area by pure chance, too. Ryder was currently up on a platform scanning with his AI, but Evfra had already promised the Moshae that, as soon as they had the manpower to spare, they would send a guard for a joint team of Nexus and angaran scientists to investigate this place. Perhaps history was not his focus, but it had never sat right with him that they knew so little about these impressive structures. It shouldn’t have been aliens who revealed the origin of their species to them, even if they did seem to be friendly aliens for now.

Evfra left Jaal and the Moshae to marvel at the immense space stretching out before them, his attention drawn by a series of short columns with glowing, fractured cubes slowly rotating above them. Small remnant robots moved silently back and forth between them. Nothing in here had attacked them yet and these, too, took no note of Evfra.

He leaned closer to inspect the cube. That was when one of the robots suddenly collided with his head. He winced when he felt a small sting.

Evfra quickly shoved the thing away with his hand and pointed his gun at it with the other, but the robot had already lost interest, returning to flying in slow circles with the others. Evfra still kept his weapon trained on it as he reached for his head. There was a small spot of blood on his glove when he pulled it back. Had it poked him? Or maybe it had simply collided with him due to malfunction and accidentally scratched him with a protruding part in the process?

“Everything alright, Evfra?” Ryder called.

“I think so. This one might be faulty, or it might have wanted something from me – maybe a blood sample.”

Jump cushioned by her jet pack, Vetra Nyx, the turian, landed next to him just as Jaal joined him as well, his rifle drawn.

One of the robots pivoted and now ambled towards Jaal. Evfra gave Jaal a shove before the chest.

“Step back,” he said, raising his gun.

The robot stopped its leisurely pursuit just about at the edge of the circle of light emanated by the cubes, hovering there.

“Not very aggressive, are they?” Ryder asked. He’d joined them now, too. “SAM thinks they might be scientific tools, not weapons. They have some similarities with machines we found in the place where we discovered the angaran ‘blueprints’.”

“It’s not reacting to me,” Nyx said.

“Or me,” Ryder chimed in, going as far as patting the little flying drone on the side. It wobbled a little, course-corrected, but paid him no heed otherwise. “So it only wants angara?”

“How curious.”

The Moshae had approached silently and now stepped inside the circle of light. Both Evfra and Jaal gripped their weapons tighter. However, the robots ignored her, too.

“Moshae, we don’t know what they want,” Evfra said in a warning tone.

“We won’t find out if we don’t interact with them, Evfra,” she said mildly, cocking her head. “Though it doesn’t seem like they want me. Only the men, then?” she mused, looking at Evfra and Jaal. “Though there are too few of us here to say if that is really the determining factor. It could be age as well, or some other, more complicated biological marker.”

“Maybe it’s interested in cataloguing unique angara DNA?” Jaal asked. “There might be another node that would react to females – or whatever other factor it separates us by.”

In front of the Moshae, Jaal still sounded like an anxious student sometimes. It was a little charming, but Evfra kept his attention on the robots.

“Whatever it is, the Moshae, Jaal, and me shouldn’t push too much further in until we know if it doesn’t steal DNA to make clones, or who knows what else. There is no urgency, after all.”

“I’m very interested in this place, but I see the value of returning later with more help,” the Moshae answered. “For now, there is still so much to see on the surface. That structure in the distance, the massive tower – it looked almost like a temple of sorts...”

Her measured speech quickly won everybody’s attention and Evfra was glad that she had decided to herd them outside for the time being. After rubbing his palm once more over the pinprick wound on his head, he picked up the rear, gun at the ready.

-

The clearing where the Pathfinder’s and the Moshae’s ships had sat down was a wide stretch of wild meadow, filled with the heady smell of golden blossoms that cascaded down a cliff which created a wall to the south, whereas on all other sides a light forest hugged the grassland. Evfra felt pleasantly exhausted for once instead of bone-deep tired as he stepped down the ramp of the Moshae’s ship in the evening. They had walked all day, but there hadn’t been the rush of adrenaline that made extended combat so tiring, only strange landscapes, unknown animals, and new plants to marvel at. Now that night was falling, three moons rose in a perfectly clear sky.

A small rivulet of a waterfall descended from the cliff and wound away in a gurgling band headed for a sparse copse of trees with broad, leathery, olive-coloured leaves. Evfra followed it and, once he had breached the underbrush, sat down on a flat stone by the side of the brook. On Aya, he barely ever got out of the city and on Havarl, until very recently, nature had been an active threat. It used to be that he liked strolling through the wilderness, though on Voeld that meant something very different. Despite this not being the icy wastelands of his home, though, Evfra could have seen himself enjoying a solitary walk here.

A distinct sound of footsteps disturbed the quiet backdrop of wind rustling in the leaves and the chirping and scurrying of animals. A hand already on the firaan on his hip, Evfra looked over his shoulder to see Jaal.

“Good evening,” Jaal said with a smile. “I saw you coming out of the ship. We haven’t had a chance to talk yet, so I figured I would join you.”

Evfra gave a nod. He’d travelled on the Moshae’s ship, which was necessary for her protection, but he’d keenly felt the whole way that he’d wished to be on the Pathfinder’s vessel instead. When he could not speak to Jaal in person for too long, it was like a band between them was pulled too far, too taut, and since one end was anchored in his chest, the tension hurt. He had never told Jaal of this and did not plan to.

“I won’t have time to come here again soon unless we do find someone to fight, so I figured I should take it in.” Evfra cocked his head. “There are koronaar over there,” he added, pointing at the small, green-winged birds. “They’re all over the Resistance headquarters. It’s odd, seeing them sitting in a kind of tree that’s completely unknown to me.”

“Isn’t it? The mix and match of the familiar with the new...” Jaal laughed, elated, as he fell down next to Evfra in the grass. “What do you think of this discovery?” His smile was playful. “I can even read it on the faces of the aliens, but not yours.”

Evfra raised his brow, but did not answer to the teasing. “It’s a particular place,” he decided after a moment. “Voeld has a lot of wild, open spaces, but I never thought they looked like they were missing any footprints. It’s different here. This stretch we landed on has so many Remnant structures with docile guardians. It’s like an empty house waiting for people to move in.”

“I thought the same thing. The Jardaan have left us a real mystery to solve! I do wonder if any of this will help us to find out if they still live.”

Evfra made a quiet noise of doubt. “This is a lot of trouble to go through just to drop your project and disappear into the stars.”

“Maybe they were forced out by whatever created the Scourge?”

“Possible.”

It was a topic Jaal and him had discussed often. Since Jaal had a background in archaeology that Evfra lacked and was at the forefront of exploration at the Pathfinder’s side, he made for a good partner for such back-and-forth. In the end, of course, it was all guesswork. Evfra didn’t usually waste his time on that sort of thing – as long as the Jardaan were not on his doorstep to start trouble, he had more pressing problems to deal with –, but Jaal’s infectious curiosity always distracted him.

Jaal also knew how to distract him in other ways. With their conversation come to a comfortable lull, his hand landed on Evfra’s knee.

“We do have some time before the others will wonder where we went...”

The same eagerness he brought to the ruins was reserved for these moments as well. Evfra couldn’t pretend it wasn’t flattering to see the want in his eyes and the hope on his face. If only the opportunity to have his ego stroked had been all that had let him fall into Jaal’s bed again and again, he might have stopped at some point.

“Aren’t you exhausted?” he asked, aware that Jaal knew if Evfra did not give a blunt no, it was always as good as a yes. “We were on our feet for fifteen hours.”

“I have had to do a lot of walking lately,” Jaal said, leaning his head against Evfra’s side.

Evfra took a furtive glance over his shoulder. With the low-hanging boughs of the trees, he doubted they could be seen from the ships. Jaal and him had never defined what they did as secret, but since there was no relationship, no romance, there was no reason to talk about it, and Jaal knew Evfra did not enjoy his private life being discussed in public, so he had at least never spread the news to any soldiers in the Resistance.

His voice of reason, which Evfra was usually so careful to adhere to, was easily stifled by desire. Jaal hadn’t been on Aya in weeks.

His hand smoothed down the back of Jaal’s head, over the hard ridges that the soft folds tapered off into, before he fastened one hand on Jaal’s shoulder and pushed him into the grass as he straddled his hips. Jaal let out a gasp as his back hit the ground.

People said Evfra was not very angaran, lacking the necessary abundance of strong emotions. Sometimes, he wished they were right.

“We don’t have much time,” Evfra said, perhaps a little smug about the lust he saw written all over Jaal’s face.

He leaned down and kissed Jaal’s smiling mouth, both hands pressed down on his chest. Jaal grabbed the back of his thighs, tugged him tighter against his middle. His fingers quickly found the latches and pressure points of Evfra’s armour that let the codpiece and the casing over his backside fall away. For as long as Evfra had lived, angaran armour had been built to easily split into parts at several seams. The original use of removing the pieces that connected the torso to the thighs was obviously to take care of the demands of nature in a situation when struggling out of all armour might get you killed. Since they had so long made guerrilla warfare on a more powerful enemy, where you could spend days in the field, this design was necessary. However, the manifold jokes told by angaran soldiers proved that the easy access had always been taken advantage of in other ways. Tempers ran hot in war, after all, and the angara had never been likely to deny them.

He moved his hips up so he could return the favour, too, but Jaal’s hands pulled him closer again as he made a muffled sound of protest into his mouth. Evfra snorted.

“It won’t work like that,” he noted, pushing back with more strength so he could get a hand under himself and open up Jaal’s armour to free his hard cock.

He would have loosened the back, too, but Jaal would have had to move for that and he was already dragging him into another open-mouthed kiss, so Evfra let it be. He wanted to be close to Jaal, as close as possible, whether by fucking him or taking his cock; though after allowing higher thought to be in control for a second despite Jaal’s tongue in his mouth, he decided that with nothing to ease the way, he’d rather be the one to take it, anyway.

He grasped Jaal’s cock tightly in his hand. It was so long Evfra could always feel him deep in his stomach when Jaal decided to have him, but not so thick that it left him struggling too much, and always wet with precome from the first moments on. Jaal’s hips twitched upwards, against his hand. Because of his obvious want, Evfra wondered, hoped briefly if he’d also waited the same amount of time as him. He set the thought aside immediately. He had no claim on Jaal and what he did with the aliens on board the Pathfinder’s ship, or with old friends when he visited Havarl, was something Evfra didn’t need to think about right now.

Evfra separated to pull his glove off with his teeth and slid his forefinger into his own mouth under Jaal’s wide-eyed gaze, wetting it with spit.

“Will you... ?”

“I can take it,” Evfra said firmly.

That voice seemed to do something to Jaal, as he shivered, massaging Evfra’s thighs, before he gave a low laugh in the back of his throat. “It feels like we are wild, ancient angara,” he murmured, smiling. “Out in nature like this...”

“You have a lively imagination,” Evfra huffed, but he could not quite deny it. There was weight to the idea that they might be among the first angara who had ever set foot on this world, and now the first who embraced under its three-moon sky.

Pressing his finger into himself, exhaled, loosened his muscles, more a mental than a physical act. He wanted Jaal now, had wanted him weeks ago, and so he kept it inside himself just long enough to get used to the stretch before he shifted himself over Jaal’s cock. Jaal held his hips, watching his face as Evfra lowered himself on him. He bit his lower lip as Evfra’s body closed around him, an endlessly attractive expression.

They didn’t have enough lubrication to go very fast, but the wait had riled Evfra up so much that he knew he would not be able to hold on for long, anyway. Jaal squirmed, but did not succeed to keep still for long, his hips making short, quick pushes upward, and Evfra pinned him down by the shoulders and met them with hard movements, the muscle in his stomach and thighs tight, breath coming in short bursts. It was Jaal’s hands which smoothed out the tension, as they always so easily could, made him open up and give in while he drank in Jaal’s unfettered noises, the deep moans and encouragements in a Havarl dialect that always grew thicker and less understandable when Jaal was aroused and sounded beautiful to Evfra.

Jaal let Evfra set the pace, stroked him in time with his movements, and Evfra came first for once, surprised by the strength with which is orgasm hit him. As he still sat shuddering, his body moved with Jaal’s forceful thrusts, as he finally lost his control and fucked into Evfra hard before spending himself inside him.

Evfra breathed out, looked up. Moonlight fell silver between the broad leaves overhead, and following its beams, he found it again on Jaal’s skin, which looked a soft purple in the light.

“The night is brighter here,” he said quietly.

“Perfect for angara. We do need the light,” Jaal answered thoughtfully, his hands wandering up Evfra’s thighs.

As Evfra leaned back, comfortably sitting in Jaal’s lap and looking out into the forest, the image of the two primal angara that Jaal had offered came into his head, putting him in mind of Jaal and himself as two beings freshly freed from their pods.

He knew that as soon as he got off the ship on Aya, there would be a hundred things he would have to catch up on, but he did not regret coming here.

-

“It’s unusual to see you here without my request.”

Olvek showed him a small smile, which Evfra had to allow him for all the times Olvek had basically had to order him into his clinic. Evfra was not so unreasonable that he had to worry that he might be dead without a less assertive doctor at headquarters, but if not for Olvek, he probably would have suffered longer and unnecessarily under quite a few illnesses and wounds that he himself hadn’t considered important enough to worry about.

“I’ve had some symptoms I can’t explain,” he said, lowering himself on the edge of the table in Olvek’s private examination room.

“What are they?”

“For the last few weeks, I’ve felt sick in the mornings. Lately, my stomach is churning, too – I cannot explain it better than that, but it’s some sort of movement. It doesn’t seem to get better. A few smells that never bothered me before make me want to throw up now. My back hurts, but I don’t remember twisting it.”

“I see. Anything else that changed?”

Evfra thought for a moment. “I have gained weight,” he added with a shrug. “I really noticed it a month ago. I didn’t think much of it, but I wouldn’t know what caused it. Might just be my age.”

In truth, he forgot more meals than he ate and he did not rest much during the day and nothing about those habits had changed. However, he wasn’t twenty anymore, either, and perhaps having nothing but high-energy requisition food paste was catching up to him.

“Possible,” Olvek said thoughtfully. “Let me check your stomach first. I want to make sure we’re not dealing with something worse than stored fat. From a first look, you don’t seem to have gained weight anywhere else.”

Evfra nodded and pulled off the top of his bodysuit and his rofjinn before he laid back on the stretcher. He thought that if he had a tumour of such a size, he’d notice it more keenly than just from not keeping breakfast down, but he wanted that option struck off the list, too.

Olvek grabbed the scanner from the nearby x-ray apparatus and let its green beam run over Evfra’s mid-section. The screen was turned away from Evfra, so he watched Olvek’s face instead. However, instead of interest, relief, or concern, he just saw confusion.

“Wait. I think I have old data stored on the machine.”

He pressed a button, let the scanner run again. The frown on his face deepened.

“Can I touch you?” he asked, after a long moment.

“Yes,” Evfra said slowly. “Why?”

“I... let me see.”

Olvek placed his hands on his stomach, carefully mapping the swell of it. As he pressed down, Evfra felt the stirring inside him again, a pointed sting to the left side against Olvek’s fingers. Olvek’s eyes grew wider.

“What is it?” Evfra pushed.

Olvek had thirty years of experience working with soldiers. There was not a lot that shocked him anymore.

“Well, the diagnosis is simple,” he said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

He grabbed the screen and turned it towards Evfra. Even without medical education, the picture that presented itself to him was clear as daylight: surrounded by a white outline on green ground was the shape of a child curled in on itself, its head still too big, but obviously fairly far into its development.

Wordlessly, he stared at Olvek.

“I wish I knew,” Olvek said in response to Evfra’s silent question. “I thought the machine must be throwing up wrong data, but it’s running fine and these,” he pointed at the edges of the screen, where organs and bones were caught on the scan, “are parts of a biologically male body, so it can’t be left over from a patient of female sex. Besides, I can feel the child with my bare hands.”

The terror that smashed through Evfra left him dizzy. He’d not dared to find a partner over the last ten years, hardly even friends, because the pain of loss still sat so deep. He knew he should have marvelled at the medical impossibility of it, but the alarm signals blaring in his head made it difficult.

“I can’t have a child,” he burst out.

He wasn’t sure himself if he was pointing out the biological problem, or if it was the sudden tidal wave of panic that pushed against the idea.

“I know.”

“How is that possible?” Evfra managed, trying to make his voice steady. “The male uterus is entirely vestigial, isn’t it?”

All angara of male sex were born with one, but it served no purpose.

“If you had asked me five minutes ago, I would have told you so, yes.”

Evfra took a deep breath. _Stop. Assess. Continue._

“How old is this thing?”

“About two and a half months, halfway through to birth. In normal circumstances, I’d have to inform you that it’s too late for anything but a medically necessary abortion, since the child is old enough to survive in an incubator. Considering I don’t even know how this foetus is growing inside you, though, I think it might still meet the criteria.”

“I don’t... no, I don’t think I would if I don’t have to,” Evfra stammered.

He’d not had a child of his own, but he’d been a communal father to many: younger cousins, siblings, nieces and nephews, who almost had been as his own to him, and who were all gone now, stolen, killed, perhaps changed. The protectiveness he felt towards the clump of cells was raw instinct, but immediate and strong.

Slowly, his brain kicked into gear again. Yes, protection. There was something that needed his help inside of him. He had to get it together.

_Two and a half months._

Evfra sat up straight.

“I was on Reveya two and a half months ago,” he said. “We entered a facility. A small robot approached me. I thought at the time it might just have scratched me with a piece of broken metal, but it might have pricked me with a needle, too – I couldn’t tell. It only reacted to angaran men. The Pathfinder’s AI also said that it suspected the facility was involved in creating angara.”

Olvek looked at him in wonder.

“If it is, and considering the power these Jardaan had, perhaps that was an experimental treatment to activate the vestigial uterus in males,” Olvek said, finishing Evfra’s thought. “Our own scientists have been working on experiments like that for a while, but we have never gotten this far.”

“Then what in the name of all stars is this child? Some sort of implanted blueprint angara? A clone of me?”

“Well, I can at least tell you what parts it is made up of. Let me take a blood sample. The foetal DNA analysis only takes a moment.”

While he spoke, Olvek was already preparing the syringe. Evfra stretched out his arm, allowing him to set it. Blue liquid filled the empty tube. He had never gotten light-headed from having blood drawn before, but he found himself leaning back against the wall now for support. He doubted it had anything to do with the needle.

Olvek placed the tube in a small cube that was drawn in by yet another complicated set of machinery. While they waited, Evfra looked at the screen again.

“It’s a girl?” he asked quietly.

You could always tell by the size and shape of the folds, even at such an early stage.

“Yes, indeed,” Olvek said.

Evfra looked at the baby. With her closed eyes and balled fists, she looked like she was sleeping. _Stars._

His thoughtless confusion had not ended yet when Olvek gave another noise of surprise.

“What now?” Evfra asked.

“There is something odd about her DNA,” he said. “She’s no doubt biologically your child. There is also another foreign DNA there, though, as there would be with any normal child. What surprises me is that I have the DNA match in my Resistance database. It’s Jaal.” He shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Evfra opened his mouth, closed it. _Damn me._

“It does,” he said, not looking at Olvek, “if we speculate the robot primed me to collect _DNA_ in ways roughly similar to how someone in a female body might, at least.”

“Oh,” Olvek made, with a second’s delay. “Well – there is a connection between the organ leading to that orifice and the vestigial womb...”

Evfra did his best not to drop his head in his hands. _Focus. You made the asinine decision to sleep with him almost a year ago. It just had worse consequences than you thought it would._

“So it is a healthy baby, aside from the fact that it is stuck inside of me?” he asked.

To his credit, Olvek worked quickly through the series of shocks he had gotten this evening.

“Yes,” he said. “From the scan, I would say she seems to be growing according to what I would expect. If she continues at this pace, it should be no trouble to deliver her via a Caesarian in about two months and two or three weeks – I’d have to do the math on the date.”

“Good,” Evfra said, and added, not asking: “I can count on your discretion for now.”

“Of course.”

“I know this will be of interest to biologists and doctors. I’m willing to share my medical records on this matter.” After all, what was a catastrophe to him would have been a blessing to quite a few, especially those who believed that unbroken bloodlines were needed to pass down the spirits of ancestors. He had to think of the community in this, too. “First, I have to take care of some – personal issues, though.”

He swung his legs off the side of the bed and pulled his body suit back on.

“Where are you going?” Olvek asked.

“As far as I know, we haven’t made further investigations into the facility. I’m going to up its designation from potentially dangerous to high danger zone so people discuss with me before they set foot in there. Who knows what else is inside?” Evfra rubbed his forehead. “If there are any more tests you want to run, don’t hesitate to call me.”

He might have avoided Olvek when it was only his own health on the line, but obviously, that wasn’t true anymore.

-

Evfra had not seen Jaal in some weeks, but they had been scheduled to meet on the Nexus, where Evfra would go to discuss matters of continued settlement of worlds discovered through Meridian, Nexus colonies on angaran worlds, angaran colonies on Eos, and joint military efforts through APEX. They did not expect to hammer out details of contracts here, otherwise Paaran and the Moshae would have accompanied him, but to feel each other out. While such talks were frequently tedious, Evfra had looked forward to his time on the Nexus simply because he knew he would have his own hotel room and Jaal could likely spend the night there without being missed.

Thinking about meeting Jaal now turned his stomach. He spent an hour hanging over the sink the morning that his ship approached the Nexus. 

Since his journey to the Nexus had been scheduled only two days after his spontaneous appearance in Olvek’s clinic, Evfra had decided to postpone the discussion of his pregnancy until then. Matters of such gravity should be spoken about face-to-face, especially with Jaal, who was likely to have a very strong reaction, though for the life of him Evfra could not guess which one. Being a rather typical angara, Jaal had always wanted children to add to his giant family; but he likely wanted them with a partner, not his commander who he had decided to sleep with for a bit of fun on shore leave. Whatever he’d think about it, Evfra could at least be sure he would be able to read it on his face.

At least, Evfra supposed, he could not blame himself for not having guessed this was a risk.

When they landed on the Nexus, Jaal stood by the landing platform, boisterously greeting Evfra and the four Resistance soldiers, who looked relieved to see a familiar face – none of them had been in any place where aliens outnumbered them before. Evfra let them talk, listened as Jaal told them to find Andraknor at the Cultural Center.

“He has figured out how these aliens work. You know how Heskaarl are,” Jaal promised with a smile.

Evfra nodded at his soldiers to signal to them that they could scamper off and explore. He had brought them here in part because he wanted them to get used to their new neighbours. Whether they all liked it or not, they now shared a galaxy.

“The Moshae should watch her back. You make for a good ambassador yourself,” Evfra noted, eyebrows raised.

Jaal chuckled. “I try to build bridges when I can. I know many of ours are still hesitant, but in the end, the aliens are only people.”

Since they were alone between stacks of crates and parked spaceships, Jaal closed in and hugged Evfra to himself. When he stepped back, he took Evfra in from head to toe with his smiling gaze and gently reached down to pat his stomach.

“You gained a little weight. I haven’t seen that on you before.”

It was no surprise Jaal had noticed. Angaran body-suits were tight and though Evfra had considered it, draping his rofjinn to hide his stomach would have only called attention to it, since Jaal knew how he usually wore it.

Still, Evfra grabbed Jaal’s hand and tugged it away from his midsection. With his luck, the child would kick him and he’d have to explain to whole bizarre affair out here in the arrivals area.

“Criticism already?” he asked flatly. “I have barely set foot here.”

Jaal shook his head. “You are as handsome as before. I just miss out on so many little things, being gone so much...” He hesitated, but smiled. “Come. Director Tann asked me to lead you inside.”

Evfra opened his mouth. He wanted to tell him that they had to talk as soon as possible, but Jaal got that mischievous glint in his eyes and leaned forward, pressing a kiss on his open mouth. Evfra frowned at him and Jaal laughed and Evfra suddenly did not have the strength to put a cloud over the sweet moment.

-

Since the discussions were even more boring than Evfra had expected, he had enough time during the day to curse himself for his cowardly reluctance. He hadn’t meant to give Jaal a full run-down of the situation, but it would have been fair to prepare him for the fact that an uncomfortable conversation would have to happen.

One advantage of the Nexus leadership, as Evfra learned, was that they were squabbling so much that he was not needed for much input, which made his absent-mindedness excusable. He still managed to bolster some of his impressions from Meridian: mainly that he would avoid Director Tann if he at all could and would foist him onto Paaran instead; that he would not get between him and Foster Addison or Nakmor Kesh; and that if he needed to talk to anyone, it would be this Nakmor Kesh or Tiran Kandros. The latter he’d already spoken to when organising their first APEX missions, so he had a bit of an in with him. Nakmor Kesh was of the krogan species, most of which had ended up on Elaaden after the initial chaos of their arrival, but unlike her more hard-headed fellow krogan, she seemed like a person that could be bargained with. Jaal also knew her grandfather, which was potentially useful.

A change of scenery had already been planned: Evfra would make for Eos the next day to meet with the mayor of Prodromos himself. The new addition he learned about today was that the Pathfinder would be his escort, even though Evfra assured them he did not need one. It made him wonder if Tann was more worried about Prodromos’s than Evfra’s. Considering what Akksul had almost done to the place, Evfra figured this was one of Tann’s brighter moments.

When he left Tann’s office, it was late enough that the Ayan clock on his multitool, which was the one angara used as a default, showed ten in the evening.

He’d just started to consider how to locate Jaal when the question was answered promptly by a tap on his shoulder. Behind him stood the entire crew of the Pathfinder’s ship, Jaal and Ryder in front.

“What is this ambush for?” Evfra asked.

Jaal chuckled. “I knew you’d figure us out right away.”

“We’re going to the Vortex,” Ryder announced.

“The only bar we have on the Nexus so far,” Kosta supplied. “You’re invited.”

“It’s not as bad as you’d think it’d be with no real competition, though.” This was Nyx.

Had it only been Jaal, Evfra would have told him to follow him instead, despite the hopeful gaze Jaal was sending him, but bluntly turning down the whole group was obvious enough that Jaal would probably have to answer questions later. Evfra did not wish to put him in that position.

_Any excuse to buy yourself some time, right, Evfra?_

But he’d already given a curt nod of his head before he thought better of it.

“I suppose I have not gotten to spend much time with you and your crew yet,” he told Ryder. “And it’s not like we will stop running into each other.”

“You don’t have to sound that put out about it,” Ryder joked before he turned to his crew. “Alright! We’ll meet my sister there.”

“How is she doing?” Evfra asked as he fell in next to Jaal.

“Good. She’s on her feet again.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

He could see the joy on Ryder’s face. As foreign as these aliens were, some things made them very different from the kett and Evfra was happy about that. The lack of concern for each other had always been one of the most chilling aspects of the kett for him. An enemy that stepped on the backs of their own corpses the way they did was so difficult to see as another conscious being. In private, Evfra had almost hoped that they only hid their grief and worked through it where the angara could not see, but now that he knew how the kett were made, he could no longer pretend as much. They treated each other as expendable because that was what they were, an easily renewable resource.

“Evfra?”

It seemed he had missed some comment or question, as Jaal gently brushed his fingers over his arm.

“Excuse me. It’s been a long day.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kosta said, grinning. “We’re not going for cerebral talk tonight. I think we all need to put our feet up for a bit.”

They walked through the Common Area together, many eyes following them. After all the stunts he had pulled off to anchor his people in Andromeda, Ryder was probably becoming somewhat of a star among his own. He was young for it. One could only hope he would handle it well.

Though not fully identical, Sara Ryder’s face was mirrored in her brother’s and Evfra recognised the right door by her standing next to it. She waved at them and then came over to hug her brother. As they fell into conversation, their group pushed further in.

Like much of the Nexus, the Vortex looked somewhat under construction still. Bare pipes and cables were visible on the ceiling, but seating and tables had been distributed liberally enough to hold a good number of guests and there was a fully stocked bar. A song underscored by a heavy beat played over speakers.

Ryder led them to one of the long, three-sided couches which hugged a large table. Mindlessly following Jaal as he was, Evfra ended up squeezed in a corner between him and the massive form of Nakmor Drack. 

“The bartender, Dutch, is a weirdo,” the asari woman with the wild black make-up called across the table from Jaal’s other side. Evfra thought he remembered that her name was Peebee. “He makes great drinks, though.”

“No alcohol or hallucinogens. I have a meeting tomorrow,” Evfra muttered. It was a good enough excuse.

“Hallucinogens?” Drack gave a deep, rolling laugh. “Sounds like I gotta visit an angaran party some time.”

“I will be sure to invite you to one,” Jaal said.

Under the table, he placed his hand on Evfra’s knee.

Ryder and two humans that Evfra didn’t know, likely of the in-ship crew, had gone to the bar while the conversation at the table expanded with an ease that told Evfra the Pathfinder’s crew did not mind to spend time together even outside the ship. For as haphazardly assembled as they appeared, it seemed Ryder had managed to find people who fit together regardless.

“There you go!”

Evfra looked up to see Ryder lean precariously across the broad table to place drinks in front of Jaal and him. The liquid in his glass was a rather disconcerting colour of green. Evfra turned it in his hand.

“Here’s a human custom!” the red-haired men he didn’t know said, lifting his own drink. “A toast to being able to get drunk in Andromeda.”

There were some playful complaints about the contents of the dedication, but everybody did lift their glasses, and, after looking sideways at Jaal to see if the same was expected of him, Evfra joined in and then took a sip like the others did. The drink was sweet with a pleasant sting of sourness that came as an aftertaste, but Evfra was fairly sure there was no alcohol in it.

“This is the first time you’ve met everyone, isn’t it, Evfra?” Ryder said, leaning past Nakmor.

“Yeah, what’s your first impression?” Kosta added with a grin.

Evfra raised his brows.

“I imagine your ship to be chaotic. I know from Jaal’s stories I am right. Apparently, someone sleeps in the escape pods.”

“Guilty!” Peebee called.

Jaal squeezed his knee under the table, grinning at his friends.

“Evfra does tend to have people on a shorter leash.”

“At a certain point, it becomes necessary,” Evfra said, swirling the drink in his glass. “Though ten years ago, the Resistance was not the army it is now.”

“Wow. Thought I’d hear a lecture about the state of my ship, to be honest,” Ryder said, laughing.

“You had a complicated start in your role, which lends itself to such disorder. I know that too well.” He sent Ryder a sharp glance. “Though if you would like me to give you all possible criticisms I can think of, I have a list.”

This got him laughter from around the table. Ryder raised his hands and shook his head and through the jumble of voices Evfra heard him saying that he was ‘good, thanks’.

“Evfra, there’s one question I just gotta ask,” Kosta added, after taking a swig of his drink.

“Asking questions seems to be all you’re in the mood for whenever you come to Aya.”

“Right,” Kosta said without an ounce of shame, “but so far, when it comes to you, I only got to talk to people about you. I’d rather talk to you.”

“You have questions about my decisions? My history?” Evfra guessed.

“No, I want to know if you actually like karaoke.”

Another burst of laughter engulfed the table, but though Kosta joined in, he kept his gaze on Evfra, all interest.

Evfra’s first instinct was to tell him to mind his own business, but Jaal was laughing, too, and leaning into his side, and that made him a little more inclined to see the question as good-natured teasing rather than mockery.

“I’m not going to sing here, so don’t get your hopes up,” he said coolly. “And perhaps you should consider a career in espionage. I’m surprised that you found anyone to tell you this, considering I have not done it in longer than I can remember.”

“I’m not knocking it! I just couldn’t really believe it was true,” Kosta clarified.

“If you want to do karaoke, I would take you,” Jaal said, and the flush on his cheeks might have been from the heat in here or the alcohol.

Kosta and Peebee snickered and, not for the first time, Evfra wondered how much Jaal’s fellow crew members knew about their relationship. He was not angry that, perhaps, they had information, as it gave them no advantage and unlike angara, they were unlikely to spread it across half of Aya – he just wanted to know how Jaal framed what they did when he spoke to his friends.

That reminder of his own unreasonable thoughts put a damper on his mood. What would Jaal tell them? That they were fucking, nothing more. He leaned back with his glass in hand, allowing the conversation to continue past him, and with that many people at the table, it moved on swiftly.

As he listened, he shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable. After already spending the day at a table his back ached. The kid didn’t like for him to stay in one position for too long.

 _The kid._ He had gotten used to the physical reality quickly enough, though the gravity of it still left his blood running cold. Still, shutting his eyes before the truth had never been his style. There was a being he shared his body with.

“Is everything alright?”

Jaal leaned close enough to speak over the voices at the table as well as the pulsating music. Evfra nodded his head.

“I think I pulled a muscle in my back,” he said quietly.

“Maybe I could give you a massage later...”

Evfra managed a lopsided smile and apparently that was enough to hold Jaal over, since he was in such a good mood. However, the disquiet now sat lodged in Evfra’s chest and hooked its claws in, as Jaal closing in with such ease had made him realise where the fleeting feeling of familiarity had come from before, when he’d spoken with the crew. Back in the day, before it had all fallen apart, he had sometimes been to gatherings like this, often at his husband’s side or with friends or family members, never himself the sort to dive into an unknown crowd, but happy to stick by the side of someone he knew, enjoying himself with while others celebrated around him.

It was too much – too much like Jaal was his man, too much like those angaran melting pots of friends and family – when his own body reminded him that he carried a new member of his dead clan under his ribcage. He could almost hear the guns and smell the blood, taste the earth. He’d laid face-down, left for dead as the others had been carried away.

“I will be right back,” he said, nudging Jaal, before he squeezed past the row of aliens.

The beat thrummed from his head through his feet, confusing his stumbling heart as he hastened to the door. He needed fresh air, as much of it as you could get on a damned space station.

When outside, he walked and walked until he met a railing overlooking the docked spaceships. He took a deep breath, leaning heavily on it, forced himself back in line, back to reality. It was not the first time since Olvek’s announcement that his grip has loosened. Scenes, images, emotions he’d shoved under a trap door for years were now crawling back out.

_I didn’t protect them. Why would I be able to protect this child? People have called me father before and look how that turned out for them. We struggled to survive, but the only way the Resistance made a real dent is because the aliens came and happened to wield the right piece of technology. I’m not protecting Jaal, either, whether he wants me or not. He’s barely been with the Pathfinder for half a year and he already has a scar from a gunshot that could have shredded his brain._

He gripped the iron bar under his hands tightly and held on to it like it was the only thing keeping him anchored to the ground.

Something placed itself between his shoulder blades. Evfra jumped, reaching for his firaan.

“My apologies.”

Evfra breathed out, glancing at Jaal, who stood by his side. “What are you doing here?” he managed, hoping his voice did not shake.

“You were gone for a while. I thought I should check on you.”

Evfra was sure Jaal was right, though he didn’t know. Time had rushed by and stood still at once.

“Tomorrow morning, before we make for Eos, I need to talk to you in private. Come to the hotel room they put me up in.”

It sounded grave. Evfra was too exhausted to hide that truth.

“We could talk right now,” Jaal offered.

“Go enjoy yourself with Pathfinder. I don’t plan to pull you from them. No one is dying, either,” Evfra clarified.

“But it’s important to you, I can tell.”

With those words, Jaal turned and Evfra had no choice but to follow if he wanted to continue the conversation. However, Jaal gave him no chance to speak, but led them straight back into the Vortex and Evfra was surprised enough to follow mutely. Just half a year ago, Jaal would not have acted around him with such confidence. Plainly placement with the Pathfinder had done him some good.

Jaal had to lean across the whole table to get Ryder’s attention.

“Ryder, I think I will be off for the night.”

“Oh, right! Call me when you’re at the Tempest. I’ll let SAM unlock the ship.”

Jaal paused for a second.

“I might make use of that later. Perhaps I will arrive after you, though.”

Ryder managed to keep his expression under some amount of control, but Peebee and the human man with the red hair that Evfra didn’t know did not. Jaal ignored them, though, quickly taking his leave.

“Since when do they know?” Evfra asked, stepping out of the Vortex with him.

Jaal winced.

“I did not tell them on purpose! I...” He chuckled, expression contrite. “I’m afraid I was figured out. You know I am not a very good liar.”

“You can share what you want with your friends,” Evfra murmured, stabbing at his multitool screen to make it light the way to the second floor of the Common Area, where the make-shift hotel was. “It’s only a problem on Aya, since people there love to question any shred of good reputation I have.” He halted, snorted at his own words. “I’d deserve whatever they’d say about this, too.”

“You told me I was the only man you had slept with since your husband,” Jaal said. “You hardly treat your soldiers as a dating pool.”

“Yet here you are.” Being weak once was enough – and Evfra had been weak around Jaal many times. However, throwing that in Jaal’s face as if he was a mistake was pathetic. Evfra shook his head. “You know what? Don’t feel the need to be silent on my behalf. I’d rather be seen as unprofessional than be someone who makes a lover lie.”

Jaal smiled brightly at him and Evfra did not know why. Perhaps the act of subterfuge was just so unnatural to Jaal that he was happy to be released from it, even if Evfra had never told him explicitly to keep a secret.

There was no hotel staff, just another empty hallway that led to a wide white door, which parted when Evfra let it scan the code Director Tann had sent to him. Inside there was a bed, a few stray pieces of furniture – a bare place, but all he needed, and all that could be expected considering the circumstances of their arrival.

He waited for the door to close behind Jaal.

“You have to let me finish,” he said, not allowing himself even a second of hesitation.

“Alright.”

Jaal sat down at the crate that stood in for a table, but Evfra paced to the window.

“I’m pregnant,” he said.

“What?”

He’d asked Jaal to let him finish, but he could not blame him for that immediate misstep.

“I can’t be a hundred percent sure what caused it, but my guess is that the robot we met in that angara vault reactivated my vestigial womb. According to Olvek, it works so well now that it immediately found itself an inhabitant.” He raised his voice a little, talking over another word of confusion from Jaal. “The problem is that when he scanned the foetus, Olvek found your DNA match as well as mine, which makes some amount of sense. We slept together on Reveya after visiting the facility and the child is about two months and three weeks old.”

It seemed he had talked all the words out of Jaal because he just sat there staring at him in wide-eyed amazement, which quickly darkened to fear and doubt. Evfra’s heart sank. He’d hoped that Jaal would at least not hate the idea of a child, any child of his.

“I don’t expect anything from you, but it felt right for you to know,” he said quietly, turning away to the window. “Still, the pregnancy is too far along to terminate it and I have personal reasons not to do so.”

“That’s not what I want!” Jaal burst out.

From the scrabble of plastic against the floor, Evfra could tell his chair had been violently pushed back. He turned around to see Jaal come closer, stopping himself a foot from Evfra.

“This sounds dangerous,” he said. “Wouldn’t you be the first person born in a male body to carry a child? Pregnancy is not a small change. It could kill you! I might have...”

Jaal looked harrowed.

“You didn’t know it could happen. Complications are a possibility,” Evfra allowed, keeping his voice calm, “though if the Jardaan planned to make biologically male bodies carry, they had apparently gotten far in the design process. Olvek did a few tests and says the pregnancy is progressing like he’d expect it to. I haven’t had worse side effects than any other angara who is pregnant has to deal with. I can show you the child.”

Jaal still looked disquieted, but he nodded his head. Evfra turned to the small bag of luggage he had deposited here in the morning and grabbed the datapad that contained the folder with the images of the 3D ultrasound Olvek had performed to get the clearest possible picture of the child. He handed it too Jaal.

Jaal pressed his thumb carefully against the screen, as if he could break something inside, and stared at the first image of the baby curled in its small housing, showing well how far along she was, the small growth of her head folds.

“This is our daughter?” he said with an unsteady voice.

 _Our daughter._ To Evfra, she had been ‘the child’ so far.

“Yes,” Evfra said.

Jaal swiped from one picture to the next, and to the next. As he did, his expression smoothed into a smile. Before Evfra could say anything else, Jaal suddenly flung his arms around his neck, laughing.

At least Jaal was happy about the child, despite the circumstances, which calmed Evfra a little. He wanted Jaal to be excited about her and not feel like it ruined any plans he had had; and he wanted this unborn creature to have a father as loving, gentle, enthusiastic, and likable as Jaal. He patted Jaal on the back, held him tight with one arm around his neck.

“So this is...”

Jaal stepped back and framed Evfra’s stomach with his hands.

“If you’re lucky and I’m not, she will probably kick you sometime,” Evfra said.

Smiling, Jaal rubbed his thumb over the swell of his belly. However, his expression sobered again.

“I can’t imagine what a shock it must have been to find out.”

“Let’s say it wasn’t the news I expected to get. It still beats a tumour,” Evfra muttered.

Jaal gave a slim smile. “But did you plan to have a family again?”

Evfra never enjoyed knowing just how deeply Jaal seemed to understand him. It made him nervous that he had let him get this close.

“I didn’t expect that I would ever make such a choice again, no,” Evfra said honestly. “Yet the girl exists and seems to be a regular angaran child, no matter the circumstances, and – I am her father.”

He realised very well that he was only giving a list of obvious facts, almost mechanically, but that was as far as he had dared to sort his thoughts so far, and the worried look Jaal gave him made it clear it sounded as odd to him as it did to Evfra.

“Excuse me. I haven’t slept much since I found out,” he added, which was at least not a lie.

Jaal took him by the wrist and directed him away from the window to the bed. “Then you should catch up on it.” 

“You’re right,” Evfra admitted.

Jaal hesitated for a moment before he straightened his back. “Can I stay with you tonight?”

Jaal had slept in his bed before, but usually only when they’d had sex and he’d just happened to already be in it, sprawled-out and naked. However, Evfra was sure that tonight, Jaal wanted to stay a little closer to his daughter while he wrestled with this new reality, so since he did not want to take that from Jaal, he nodded his head – even knowing that his misguided heart would promise itself too much just because Jaal had stuck around even without the implicit promise of a blowjob in the morning.

After undressing, Evfra crawled under the blanket. Before he could wonder if they would lie awkwardly back to back, before he’d even properly laid down, Jaal had already embraced him from behind, his broad warm chest pressed against him.

“I’m glad you want to keep her,” he said quietly.

“I had a hunch you would want to meet your kid,” Evfra said. “Besides, it does feel like a scientific duty of some sort.”

“You haven’t done much for the angaran cause, so at least you can do this for our people,” Jaal said with a quiet chuckle.

Evfra huffed. Jaal somehow always managed to wrench a smile from him no matter the situation.

-

Evfra slept a little more that night, telling himself it was from pure exhaustion, but the relief of knowing Jaal on his side for this mess was plainly a factor. When he woke up, it was from the kid shifting inside of him. Half-asleep, he dragged Jaal’s hand down from his chest to his stomach, and the surprised, delighted noise behind him told him Jaal was already awake. After a glance at the clock had assured him that he had time to doze still, Evfra let his eyes drift shut again.

The next time he woke, Jaal had pushed his arm under Evfra’s head while he kept the other carefully around his stomach, his legs over Evfra’s, leaving Jaal’s whole body wrapped around him, his face buried against the back of Evfra’s head. Evfra wished he could have simply put off all plans for today and stayed here until evening, or another week.

However, duty won as it always did and he gently extracted himself from Jaal’s grip. After showering and getting dressed, they went down to the spaceport together and separated to get on their respective ships, but Jaal turned to him again before he left.

“Can I tell them about... ?”

“Yes.” Evfra paused. “I do plan to tell everybody soon. It’s going to be inevitable to explain my state when it can’t masquerade as normal weight gain anymore. Should I keep your name to myself?”

“No,” Jaal said without hesitation, his lips curling into a smile. “It won’t be three months until the child is here. It will be obvious by then if they see me making off with your child all the time.”

“You’re right,” Evfra said.

That image of Jaal with the baby in his arms was suddenly in his head and unlike just about any other thought about the child he’d had, it did not cause dread.

During the journey to Eos, Evfra’s soldiers were talking more or less without pause about the Nexus and its inhabitants, relieving Evfra from the necessity to explain how matters had gone on his end, aside from a comment that there hadn’t been any complications. He hid from his own thoughts in rote paperwork.

When they arrived on Eos, it was morning there, too, and Mayor Bradley awaited Evfra to greet him with a firm handshake, a human gesture Evfra had been taught by Jaal.

It seemed that Bradley was out for peace, but also not the type to forgive without reason, since he only made passing mention of the Roekaar’s hostility, but did not neglect to point out that spot in their past, either. Evfra was willing to play along, told him the Roekaar were in line now and considered extremists by their own, too, and having thus acknowledged it moved the topic along. Much like the discussions on the Nexus, this meeting was mostly to sniff each other out, find out who they were so that they had something to grasp on to during inevitable future negotiations and conflicts. He had a feeling he would be able to talk to Bradley if the need arose.

Prodromos was a somewhat makeshift place, but bustling with activity and a spirit of hope. Knowing what he did of the two destroyed settlements, it was understandable even this spot in the desert would seem like a great opportunity. Though Evfra was still too aware of the advantages the Nexus had over them – all the things that they might be able to hold over their head thanks to Ryder, how quickly they might expand if given the chance, and how the balance might shift in a generation when their numbers had expanded –, he did feel like they had more than earned this sanctuary.

Since Prodromos was still a new place with not too much to show, though, and Bradley did the politicking by himself, meaning there was no one else to meet as far as leadership went, they had finished their conversation after a couple of hours. Bradley excused himself to tend to other duties and Evfra was left wandering the sandy, heated grounds of the village listlessly, not wanting to jump straight back on his ship like he couldn’t wait to get away, but uncertain how to spend his time here.

“Evfra!”

He turned and saw Kosta approaching him.

“You done with Bradley?” he asked.

“He had things to do. I appreciate the meeting, but there’s no reason to keep him from tasks that actually need his attention. This isn’t exactly an emergency.”

“Yeah, for once, right?” Kosta smiled. “Congratulations, by the way.”

His gaze went to Evfra’s middle.

“Jaal wasted no time, I see,” Evfra said flatly.

Kosta laughed. “Nope, the whole ship heard about it. We all saw the pictures, too. You know Jaal.” He pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “He was looking for you, by the way. Said to drop by the Tempest if you had a minute.”

Evfra gave him a nod. Looking in the direction he had shown, he saw that Jaal was loitering by the entrance ramp with Ryder and Peebee. When he approached, Jaal saw him from a distance against the flat, uncluttered horizon of Prodromos and, with a quick gesture of his hand and a few words, excused himself from his friends, hurrying towards him.

“Kosta send me your way,” Evfra said.

“I wanted to get you alone for a moment,” Jaal said with a nod. “Let us take a walk.”

As he followed him, Evfra saw Jaal’s gaze eagerly taking in the half-built houses at the edge of the settlement, where it seemed poised to expand into the dusty plain.

“I do love to come back to Eos. I did not see it at its worst, but when Ryder first brought me here, you still had to keep your suit shut at all times or suffer from the radiation.”

“The vaults seem to work fast. That’s good news for our planets, too – not to mention any plans the Nexus settlers have for growing crops here.”

They walked side by side in silence for a moment. The heat on Eos was different than Aya, which was buffeted by strong, warm winds that smelled of sulphur, or Havarl, where the humidity made breathing hard sometimes. Here, the sun was more uncompromising, the air still and dry. However, it was bearable, which plainly had not always been the case.

“It is beautiful in its own way, too,” Jaal noted, as they walked over the uneven ground away from the buildings, outside the ring of pylons that surrounded the area of Prodromos. “All this golden sand and the rock formations and cliffs... such as this,” he added, with a playful smile.

Evfra looked where he pointed and saw that Jaal, in walking upwards on the surrounding stone slopes, had led them to a jutting part of rock that overlooked the village and the lake it was build around in one direction, and a vast stretch of golden sand shimmering in the light when you turned your head. He shielded his eyes with his hand for a moment.

“Impressive,” Evfra said. “This would be a good planet for angara, considering our reliance on sunlight. One can see why the Jardaan terraformed it this way.”

“I hope we can establish a colony here,” Jaal said. “We could learn to work together, since work is definitely needed.”

Evfra nodded his head, looking out again over the sands. In a way, this was almost like a mirror image of Voeld, except of course Voeld wasn’t supposed to look like it did and perhaps neither was Eos. It would be very interesting to see these planets in five years.

He thought that Jaal was just enjoying the view with him, but he raised his voice once more, a little less certain now: “I didn’t come to talk about politics, though.”

“No?”

Before Evfra could make a guess, Jaal had gripped his hand and turned to him.

“Evfra...” He took a deep breath. “I realise this is soon, but then, we have known each other for a long while and you know I have always respected and admired you, which I know in my heart will not change.” He smiled. “I want to be there for you and our child and so I wanted to ask – would you, at some point, consider joining with me?”

Evfra was stunned speechless for a moment by the quick rush of anger and sadness that suddenly surged in his chest. The offer had blindsided him completely and at the same time, it made sense – it was _reasonable_. Jaal, one of the most passionate people he had ever known, was making a decision of whom to join with by way of cold facts. Evfra would have hated this thought no matter who the partner was, but that he could be the one to force such a union on Jaal was a deeply revolting thought.

He yanked his hand away. “Jaal, spare me your responsibility. You are going to be a good father. You don’t need to feel like you have to bind yourself to me because of a child.”

The words were stern, but Evfra could hear his own disappointment too strongly in them. He would break if he kept talking, he realised, would reveal to Jaal how much it hurt that he was not as deeply, desperately in love as Evfra, and he would not present such a pitiful display. Without as much as another glance, Evfra stormed away from Prodromos, from Jaal, along the side of the cliff. He heard Jaal call out his name and was sure he was hurrying after him, but he did not look back.

Walking as fast as he was, shutting out all that was around him, he saw the flicker of a falling cloak, the flash of green scales at the corner of his eye just one split second before the Challyrion pounced.

It slammed into him and threw him down on his side, took them both to the edge of a cliff. Evfra just had the presence of mind to wrap his arm around a sharp edge of stone and keep himself from sliding over. With the other hand, he wanted to reach for his gun, but the Challyrion sat on his free arm. Evfra growled, trying to writhe away under it, escape its snapping jaws and the sharp decline to his right at once. Now that he took a quick look around, he saw the air shimmer and shiver in other places. _A pack._

The Challyrion fell with a whimper as a well-placed bullet pierced its brain, its weight sagging against Evfra. He scrambled to his feet, saw Jaal brandishing his modified kett sniper rifle, and quickly grabbed the pistol on his back.

Challyrions up close were not fun for experienced soldiers, either, but the camouflage and surprise attack was their great advantage. The other, of course, one any fighter could use, was a distracted prey. Jaal was only looking at Evfra and Evfra whirled when he saw Jaal go down hard on his front, toppled by one of the animals.

He was not as good a shot as Jaal, so firing at a creature wildly flailing on top of someone he wanted to save was something he usually avoided. Instead, Evfra pulled his firaan and charged in, slashing at the Challyrion’s throat, the soft spots where its legs connected to the torso. The animal turned to bite him, but Evfra managed to block it with his arm, though its teeth tore through his armour and left bloody marks. Gritting his teeth, Evfra pushed the firaan into its eye and through it into the brain before he pulled Jaal back onto his feet by his hand.

Now that he stood back to back with Jaal, both with their firearms at the ready, the Challyrions did not have much of a chance. The ones they did not shoot fled into the mountains under a hail of gunfire.

Evfra slowly lowered his pistol, breathing heavily. He glanced over at Jaal, who was still looking through his scope.

“We should tell the mayor he has vermin on his doorstep,” Evfra said. “Are you alright?”

“Of course. What about you?”

Jaal touched his bloody nose with the back of his hand. It did not look broken, but Evfra expected it probably hadn’t been fun to have his face meet the ground at full force. With adrenaline still pounding in his veins, Evfra did not react fast enough to stop himself from wiping blood from Jaal’s chin as it threatened to drip down onto his armour. The look Jaal gave him was full of surprise. Evfra quickly dropped his hand.

“Fine. A few scratches. The Challyrion didn’t manage to stand on my stomach before you got it.” He shook his head, thoughtlessly brushing his hand over his stomach. “I shouldn’t have run off on a planet I barely know.”

“No, it was my fault. I just thought it was a beautiful backdrop to propose a joining,” Jaal said, looking embarrassed.

Evfra bit his tongue.

“Your intentions are good, but I want to see you joined with someone you love because I know that would make you happiest. And while I myself could imagine joining with someone for political or other reasons than affection, I cannot enter such a union with a man who – I am not neutral towards,” he finished. “I would want more from you.”

He’d barely finished when Jaal started to laugh, loud and sudden. “Evfra! I only started my proposal like this because I thought I was more likely to win you over with a good argument...”

Evfra stared at him. After the maelstrom of emotions that had followed one after the other in the last five minutes, he did not dare to hope.

“If you are only saying this to convince me...”

“I am not.” Jaal stepped closer, his rifle now held at his side. “And it is not because of our daughter that I wish for us to form a union. I have wanted more for a long time. You are an inspiring, smart, and brave leader. The angara, I among them, have learned to hope again because of the things you have done. That is only the beginning of what drew me to you, though. I adore your tenacity and your sense of duty, your passion, your intensity, but also that you can keep a much cooler head than almost anybody else I’ve met, even in moments when I feel like falling apart. I like your clever remarks, how you can make me laugh with just one look over the shoulder of some tiresome politician you are talking to. I love the way you smile at my jokes and when you fall asleep on my shoulder after a long day, how we can talk for hours. The way we make love is addicting. I can-“

“Alright, stars, enough praise! I believe you.”

Evfra could not but give a quiet huff of an incredulous laugh as he raised his hands in defence, feeling more flattered than a man of his age and experience ever should at sweet words. When Jaal took him in his arms, he hugged him back and kissed him.

“Yes,” he said, when they parted it. “If you truly want it, I will gladly join with you.”

Jaal hugged him so tightly around the chest that breathing became harder, but Evfra rejoiced in the desperate, honest force of that touch.

-

Back in Prodromos, they alerted the local guards, one of whom led them to the med bay to have their wounds tended to with medigel. It was where Ryder found them as they were just on their way out.

“What happened to the two of you?”

“A scuffle with the wildlife,” Evfra said with a shrug.

“Wildlife? What were you doing outside of Prodromos?”

His gaze went immediately to Jaal and from the knowing smile he gave Ryder, which was immediately returned, Evfra had the distinct impression that Ryder had a suspicion.

“I was searching for a memorable view,” Jaal answered and then gave a self-depreciating laugh. “Though I may have made the moment memorable in other ways.”

“At least the Challyrion knocked some sense into me,” Evfra said flatly.

Nothing like a violent attack to put his hurt feelings and hasty judgements into perspective.

“Sounds like you had a pretty exciting time,” Ryder said with a grin. “I’m happy it seems to have worked out.”

“I’m sure Jaal will tell you about it later. I have recently realised that you are all quite well-informed on the Tempest.”

His tone was not hard enough to make him sound truly angry and so Jaal and Ryder both just laughed. It was admittedly difficult to be mad now that he realised that Jaal had probably spoken in such detail about these things because he had wanted more from Evfra and had thus found their relationship important enough to discuss.

“Challyrions, you said? I guess I’ll see if we can’t find the nest,” Ryder said. “Send me the navpoint, Jaal. I’ll take Drack and Cora. Maybe we can make it a shooting competition.”

“Of course,” Jaal said, swiping his fingers over his multitool.

Ryder left and Jaal and Evfra followed at a slower pace. “I think I’m going to lie down for a moment,” Evfra said, blinking into the harsh sunlight overhead.

“Do you feel alright?” Jaal was quick to ask.

“Fine,” Evfra assured him. “I just think I probably should not push my luck as long as I have this passenger.”

“You’re right. I’ll bring you to the ship.”

“Are you afraid I cannot chance a five minute walk across a settlement for geologists?” Evfra asked, raising a brow at him.

“Eos is a dangerous place,” Jaal just said with an apologetic smile. “As we saw.”

Evfra shook his head, but did not protest more.

The ship’s inside was cool and clear, free of the dust that perpetually stood in the air on Eos. Evfra took a deep breath.

“Will you go back to Aya after this?”

“Voeld,” Evfra answered, leading Jaal towards the small cabin next to the captain’s chamber that he occupied. “I haven’t been there in a while and most of the earliest Resistance members are still there. They like for me to come in person.” He supposed he liked it, too. Those were the roots of his organisation, massive as it had grown. “Anyway, I need to see the Nexus settlement there as well as a few of the outposts.”

Jaal nodded his head and Evfra commended him for not pushing Evfra to stay somewhere safe or cut all his workload. It would have been a thankless endeavour. However, he wondered if he could have been so calm if Jaal had been the one who had carried the child. The truth was, he would have wanted him within his sight on Aya; though when he’d been Jaal’s age, not quite so harrowed by life, Evfra had been more relaxed, too.

Evfra fell down on the bed, looking up at Jaal – the man whom he would be joined to. It was almost harder to believe than that he’d fallen pregnant.

Jaal glanced briefly over his shoulder to check that the door had closed, but Evfra’s men were out planet-side, anyway, and when Jaal leaned down to embrace him and put his knee on the bed, Evfra turned and pulled him down with him, lying sideways across the cot, their dust-stained boots dangling over the edge.

Jaal held him as tightly as he seemed to dare with Evfra’s stomach in the way and Evfra kissed him hard as Jaal’s hands firmly mapped his body, needy in the way they held on to every part of him. He drew away from Evfra eventually, though, after a few more pecks.

“How tired are you?” he asked with a smile.

“I can hold out another half hour,” Evfra said, cupping his face.

Especially with the promise in Jaal’s voice, his grasping hands on him, it was no problem at all. Evfra’s heart was still pumping fast, more because of Jaal’s proposal than the attack, and it would be good to push his emotions to a high from which to fall so they could be tempered again. In the end, though, he also just wanted to keep Jaal around.

Sliding off the bed and coming to sit between Evfra’s knees, Jaal wrapped his arms around Evfra’s legs and pressed them against his own sides with a broad smile. Evfra shook his head at the foolishness, trying not to smile, and nudged him with his knee.

“Soon, this won’t work anymore,” he noted, as Jaal let go off him to open the front of his armour. For now, his stomach was not too big, but in a few weeks it would be. Since angara had fast pregnancies, the changes were quick and drastic.

“Then we should enjoy it now,” Jaal said playfully.

Evfra leaned back on one hand when Jaal lifted his cock and closed his mouth around him and rested the other hand on Jaal’s head. He could always tell his mood at a glance, and the quick, wanton movements, the speed with which he swallowed him told Evfra that the fear hadn’t left Jaal and this was not just affection, but reaffirmation that Evfra was still here. Gently, he pressed his thumb down over his folds, dragged it over his face and his cheek. The sight of his own curved stomach was still alien, but Evfra let his gaze wander past it, concentrated on those blue eyes turned up at him, Jaal’s smiling lips wrapped around him, a sight that was almost as enticing as the sensation of Jaal’s warm, wet mouth.

Jaal tended to overestimate himself when he was hasty with passion, swallowed Evfra down and then had to come up coughing and gasping for air, so Evfra kept his palm settled on Jaal’s forehead and slowed his speed. It was a comfortable, familiar gesture by now and Jaal chuckled, which Evfra felt reverberating around his cock. He could not bear to hold up the tension for long this time, though, tempted by the way the soft back of Jaal’s throat rubbed against the head of his cock and how his quick tongue played around him.

He kept his eyes on Jaal the entire time, on his blissful expression, the way his hands were holding on to Evfra’s legs, pulling one thigh against him again, like he always needed to touch as much of Evfra as he could. His hips bucked into the eager movements of Jaal’s head, though he kept a sliver of a grip on his composure to keep from choking Jaal. A quiet word of warning escaped him when he was about to come, but Jaal pushed his mouth down on him and Evfra did not fight him, breathing heavily as he watched Jaal swallow it all.

Jaal was on him momentarily, standing to embrace him again, and Evfra pulled him closer so that Jaal came to kneel over his thighs, loosening the belts on his suit to take out his cock. Jaal, his arms around Evfra’s neck, shuddered as Evfra stroked him rough and fast, holding his cock so tightly he knew it had to be on the edge of too much. Immediately, Jaal’s hot mouth was on his again, still tasting of salt, murmuring professions of affection, and Evfra counted himself lucky for that undivided, undeterred way that Jaal threw everything at him, and felt a twinge of regret that he was so bad at paying him back for it. If he was to be in a union with Jaal, he would have to be better.

At least in this moment, it seemed he was performing to satisfaction, though. Jaal spilled over his fingers while nuzzling against the folds at Evfra’s neck and Evfra stroked him until he’d given every last drop.

Evfra was the one to clean them up and put their suits back together while Jaal still laid against him.

“Can I stay for a bit?” he asked.

“I’m sure Ryder will call you back so you don’t miss your flight.”

However, as Evfra had rid himself off his armour and stretched out, Jaal did not do so with him. He sat on the edge of the bed instead, expression almost vigilant. There was that protectiveness Jaal had hidden before, Evfra thought, tugging at the bandage on his arm. You couldn’t fault him. All angara knew that losing someone was too easy and sometimes as quick as the blink of an eye. Evfra turned his head so that it would lean against Jaal’s thigh as the thought came to him, trying to chase it away. Right now, they were all still here, all three of them.

-

When Evfra walked into the Resistance headquarters this morning, he heard his own voice playing from a screen in the main observation room. It was not a surprise, though it would have been a lie to say he enjoyed it. Looking at the tight expression on his own face, he could tell the fact that he was here for necessity’s sake alone was probably obvious to most people who watched the broadcast that he had recorded last night.

“It is not my habit to make announcements about my private life and if there was not some greater use to our people inherent in it, I wouldn’t do so. Recently, on the newly discovered world of Reveyan, we have discovered another facility that our scientists now suspect to be involved in angaran creation.” His image on the screen shifted a little, but kept his gaze straight on the camera. “Among its functions is apparently that of activating the vestigial womb in biologically male angara. Through a mishap at first contact, I have become its unwitting test subject. Scientists are now starting on more involved studies. The machines do seem to be harmless, but whether they work will be determined by my pregnancy. Again, we are at too early a stage to announce this procedure as safe for willing use, but the scientists involved and me figured this announcement made more sense than letting the rumour mill run wild. After all, the repercussions of this ‘experiment’ are becoming obvious.” He paused briefly. “There is one question of a personal nature that is inevitable. I don’t intend to be haunted with it, and I have no reason to hide the identity of one of my courageous and well-respected men, so I will just add as a personal note that Jaal Ama Darav is the second father. That is all.”

He had not put the message up on any TV station or network, but on the private section of the Resistance’s intranet propaganda tab. Of course, it had still spread around quickly because a video titled _Unscheduled briefing in regards to scientific and personal matters_ with him in the thumbnail was going to stoke curiosity no matter how matter-of-fact he’d tried to make it.

“Would anyone like to give me a status report or did everyone sleep through the night shift?” Evfra said at the backs of the men and women bowed over the screen.

The Resistance soldiers flew apart like a nervous flock of sunflies. Evfra just raised his brows a them.

Since the people he trusted enough to have them work main observation knew him well enough to be aware that he did not appreciate probing questions, Evfra got little worse that day than congratulations and vague questions about the child’s health, which he accepted with more grace than he would have two weeks ago. Having Jaal’s support had made a difference, but it could not erase the darkness sitting in his heart and in some ways, having a loving husband-to-be to lose made matters even worse. Still, the panic had somewhat subsided into more muted concern, and he rested his hand on his stomach sometimes now, thinking of holding the child inside without imagining her to be a lifeless body seconds later.

Even his elites did stop to glance at Jaal, though, when he strolled into the room a couple of hours later. Currently on Aya for an extended stay alongside the Pathfinder, who was now allowed to see more than just its capital city, he’d had duties of his own to tend to this morning.

Evfra waved him outside and into his private office. “Did you see it yet?”

“I have.” Jaal smiled brightly. “I think so have other people. There are,” he glanced briefly at his multitool, “thirty-six e-mails from family members. Oh, no, there’s another.”

Evfra shook his head. That sounded about right for an angaran family. They had agreed to keep quiet about their relationship and the pregnancy to keep half-truths from making the rounds – Jaal’s family was too big for there not to be at least one leak –, but now Jaal would likely spend a day on holocomm answering every question.

“I think we should probably visit them at some point if I don’t want to risk the wrath of your mothers.”

Jaal stepped closer to smooth his hands down Evfra’s sides. “I would be happy, taoshay. I want to show you Havarl, anyway – the Havarl I grew up with.”

“Sounds like a longer visit you are planning.”

“Perhaps a few days.” Jaal inclined his head. “Speaking of breaks from work – I have asked Ryder if he would consider giving me some time off. He says I’m always welcome back on the Tempest, but I want to be here after the child is born.” His gentle hold on Evfra’s stomach grew just a bit firmer. “My own father was simply gone one day. I will do the work that is necessary so I can make sure the same fate does not befall our daughter. Still, I also don’t want to miss her life entirely doing so.”

“There are still many ways you could strive for that goal on Aya for the time being,” Evfra said with a nod and a voice that did not entirely hide how much he liked the idea. “As for the permit to stay, you wouldn’t need your own place if you don’t mind sharing mine.”

Jaal laughed as he took Evfra into his arms. “I might consider that,” he murmured before kissing him.

As Evfra tugged him closer, his mind circled around Jaal’s words. What world would their child grow up in? It was so hard to predict what the kett would do next, since he was not optimistic enough to believe they had beaten them with one strike. Still, it seemed now much more than ten years ago that there was a wall of dedicated fighters standing at the ready to counter their attempts, and first among them people like Jaal. When he placed his hand over Evfra’s stomach like he did now, it was like Evfra could imagine the shield they were building and even the broken part of him did not feel alone in this monstrous task.

Perhaps this was not designed to end in tragedy, perhaps this time Evfra had the means to fight back, and he would cling to that hope with all his might. He grabbed Jaal’s wrist tightly as he smiled at him.


End file.
